PROVIDENCE — If “Martin Boyce: When Now Is Night” had a sound component, it would be glass breaking, the roar of a building’s ventilation system sneaking up on you unawares, and the anxious clatter of stiletto heels rushing over concrete.
Boyce, the Turner Prize-winning Scottish artist, brings his first solo museum exhibition in America to the RISD Museum at the perfect time of year to plump up the portent. His anxiety-fraught work unseals the cracks beneath the shiny, bright, all-too-perfect façade of modernist design and finds it teeming with film-noir frights.
It makes poetic sense: Modernist architecture is too clean, too transparent; it leaves no room for flaws and bruises, dirt and shadows. Yet the harder we push those things away, the more likely they will haunt us.
Evidently, a year spent at the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1990s sparked Boyce’s lucid, unnerving aesthetic. Imagine the culture shock, moving from Glasgow to Los Angeles, from a centuries-old city to an icon of modernity whose perfect twinkling grid stretches over the curve of the earth when you fly over it at night.
Such grids show up twice in “When Now Is Night,” a two-part installation that takes up roughly half of the exhibition space. One white-on-black grid cascades urgently down several walls. It’s a graphic borrowed from Saul Bass’s tense title sequence to “North by Northwest,” suggesting looming, dark skyscrapers dwarfing us.
In the installation’s second gallery, a spider web made of fluorescent lights hangs ominously from the ceiling, as if descending upon us, over a blackened storage unit by dynamic design duo Charles and Ray Eames. The chockablock functionality of a bureaucratic office space seeps here with evil intent.
Film noir had its heyday in the mid- 20th century, just as Modernism’s lean designs flooded Los Angeles, hinting in sly whispers that the sunny city had a dark, dangerous underbelly. As a student 50 years on, Boyce immersed himself in the city’s design and mood. He also explored modernist tropes such as the curvilinear forms of Arne Jacobsen’s chairs and the Eames’s designs.
“Now I’ve Got Worry (Storage unit) 1,” one of the earliest pieces in the show, is a rejiggered Eames storage unit, originally a Mondrian-like grid of painted plywood sliding doors. Boyce has replaced the original plywood panels with scrap wood, which juts raggedly beyond its borders. One panel has scrawled text: “GO HOME THERE IS NOTHING 2SEE,” from a sign one Brentwood resident held up when the paparazzi swept the neighborhood following the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.
During World War II, the US Navy commissioned the Eameses to develop a lightweight splint. They’re no longer used medically, but like many Eames products, they’re still coveted, and Boyce picked one up in California for $100.
He held onto it for years before he used it in one of his sculptures — he had to break the thing up to do so. But here’s where Boyce’s work gets more cunning and intricate, reaching into a visual vocabulary that goes beyond the easy polarity of Modernism and noir.
For “Night Tulip,” Boyce has turned a splint into a wide-eyed, ghoulish mask, and for “Anatomy (for Saul Bass),” he has made a mobile that echoes the black, fractured silhouette in Bass’s poster for “Anatomy of a Murder.” Its pieces float like the abstracted petals in an Alexander Calder mobile, but with dread rather than insouciance.
Picasso and Matisse flattened, twisted, and distorted figures; they riffed on African masks, inspired by what they saw as majestic primitivism. Where do all these generations of masks and fractured bodies bring us? In Boyce’s world, Jacobsen’s chairs and the Eameses’ splint, formerly vessels for the human form, reference what’s no longer there and ask what frightful simulacrum dare take its place.
Fear and foreboding drive the work, which has such a strong surrealist flavor that we might be in a nightmare — one in which humanity’s cradle has a brutalist design.
In the 1920s, sculptors and twin brothers Jan and Joël Martel created, God forgive them, concrete trees. Who can blame them? They were caught up in the Cubist moment. Boyce invokes the trees in many pieces here, most directly in “Concrete Autumn (Phantom Tree),” a ghostly photograph.
From their spiky forms, he has developed a motif that recurs in the series “Ventilation Grills (for a house in the woods).” The brass grills sit low to the floor and are easy to mistake for ordinary vents. When you realize they’re art, the whole building ominously breathes.
The Martel-inspired stylized leaves and branches show up again in “A Raft in the Roof,” derived from Boyce’s 2009 installation at the Venice Biennale. Here, a steel grid, jagged with those shapes, looks like a bed frame, with coiled chain-link as a pillow. Another Cubist form hangs above the bed, sharp, black, and ready to cough up demonic shards. To up the ante, the freakish “Night Tulip” watches over the scene.
“Raft” is softened by “Evaporated Pools,” autumn leaves of paraffin-coated crepe paper shifting underfoot, reminding us that all hope is not lost. The life cycle continues, shifting from life to death, from sunlight to shadows and back. Boyce dwells in the twilight, and though that place is fraught with gloom, it’s also filled with riches.
MARTIN BOYCE: When Now Is Night
At RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St., Providence, through Jan. 31.401-454-6500, www.risdmuseum.org
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @cmcq.